Research and Competence Center Digitalization Berlin (digiS)

The Research and Competence Center Digitalization Berlin (digiS) is a project that coordinates and supports efforts to digitalise cultural assets in the city state of Berlin. digiS, located at ZIB, supports cultural institutions by consulting on and providing solutions for organisational, technical, legal, dissemination, and long-term availability issues. Furthermore, digiS enables knowledge transfer between institutions and provides technical assistance in the fields of data preparation, digital preservation and presentation.

Cultural heritage and memory institutions, including research institutes, are nowadays expected to administer, preserve and maintain digital cultural assets, as well as make them available to the public on a permanent basis. This poses enormous challenges for these institutions, as particularly small and medium-sized institutions have little or no experience in this respect. digiS maintains a network for individual projects involved in the funding programme and provides consulting services to aid in digitalisation, with the goal of enabling institutions to play an active role in their digital practice. In this sense, the digitalisation lifecycle is conceived as an extensive process beginning with data management and rule-based enrichment, progressing to data preparation and digitisation, concluding with the online presentation and ensuring the long-term availability of the digital assets.

With the establishment of digiS in 2012, the state of Berlin has pioneered the state-wide coordination of digitalisation projects involving cultural heritage institutions. The supported projects represent a cross-section of the cultural landscape in Berlin. As of 2017, 59 projects in 30 institutions have been assisted in total.